The Young Housewife

William Carlos Williams established a high standard for experimenting with sounds and structure in his poetry. “The Young Housewife” is an unmetered poem, and it does not rhyme. However, rhythm plays an essential role in the poem, which makes the poem lyrical. The lines primarily rely on single-syllable words, which create internal echoes and internal parallelism within the single lines. For example, in the line “At ten A.M. the young housewife” (Line 1), the phrase “At ten A.M.” (Line 1) echoes and parallels the phrase “the young housewife” (Line 1) with the same number of syllables and rhythm. A similar pattern occurs in the lines “moves about in negligee behind / the wooden walls of her husband’s house” (Lines 2-3). Even though Lines 2 and 3 do not identically match syllabically as the phrases in Line 1 do, each line consists of nine syllables that form a rhythm because of the line’s reliance on one-syllable and two-syllable words. This nine-syllable pattern continues in Line 4: “I pass solitary in my car” (Line 4).

In the second stanza, this rhythm loosens. Line 5 has eight syllables, and Line 6 has nine syllables.